Abortion didn’t mean anything until I learned of my mother's pregnancy. On her second ultrasound, the sonographer showed her she was having triplets: two boys and one girl. Her OB-GYN then told her there was a heightened risk for one of the babies to contract a disease, and to ensure the survival of the other two, she should abort one. I remember thinking in my five-year-old brain, how would it be possible to know which baby would be born ill? And how could a doctor be so impertinent and tell an expecting mother to choose which child should die? My mother didn’t have the abortion and one of my brothers passed from a heart condition. I knew life was special and I knew his life, the month that it lasted, was special. Personhood does not define when life begins, because even though I never consciously met my brother, I grew up with him in the womb and a part of him will always be with me regardless. From that point I was subconsciously against this “reproductive right” women claimed they had and I knew I was right when I had a conversation about Roe v. Wade in eighth grade. My best friend mentioned Roe was such a “power move for women [to] take control of their bodies.” I explained that an abortion, by definition, is a procedure that ends a pregnancy, which is a euphemism for the murder of a child. By her rationale, the baby is part of the woman’s body because it is inside her womb. The kicker is she was a Christian, so I couldn’t believe how far the brainwashing of public education went. I started a Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter during my freshman year of college to bring back virtue. During March, our sole focus was to promote life and the value of a human being from the point of conception. It was jarring to hear young women saying they supported abortion until birth—some even deemed post-birth abortions acceptable. One of the more common arguments I’ve heard is that the child in the womb—the “fetus”—was “just a clump of cells” or that abortion was a woman's “reproductive right.” Aren’t we all a clump of cells? Didn’t we all start as a sperm and an egg? And why do women need a safety net like abortion when we are the gatekeepers of sex? Groups of young men would awkwardly walk by the table, claiming abortion had nothing to do with them, to which I would say the baby has two parents, not one, and *both* bear the responsibility of caring for that child. I approach this issue with humility and sympathy. I can imagine a young woman who is not prepared to have a child would be scared to go through with the pregnancy. Children are an opportunity, not a consequence. As opposed to empowering women and preparing them for motherhood, the public consensus is an abortion will solve everything. I'll summarize an abortion: the death of one life and the end of two souls. Rather than allowing women to be killers, I will never stop fighting and speaking for those who can’t; God’s children deserve to live the life He plans for them.

Two cups of milk can ruin your life. When I was 12, I decided on an October evening that I would have my first battle with the oven. Unfortunately for me, when it came to baking, I had the knowledge of a newborn. My mother insisted that I try to make oatmeal cookies, so I clicked on the first recipe I found online, scoured the kitchen for all the ingredients, and pulled out all the measuring equipment we had. Between that heaping mess of potential on the kitchen counter, I placed two mixing bowls and a sticky note with the recipe in sloppy cursive. I took a deep breath and jumped in. I added the wet ingredients into one bowl and mixed the dry ingredients in the other. The whisk worked its magic and I combined both mixtures to make a clump of oatmeal playdough - at this point, I followed the recipe to the T, but something was missing. The dough was too dense in my mind, so I got a gallon of milk out of the fridge, measured two cups, and slowly streamed in a half-cup’s worth of milk; impatient and impulsive, I poured out the rest. The “dough” was now cake batter, and I globed it into a cake pan and abandoned it in the oven for 40 minutes. My experiment did not look anything remotely similar to oatmeal cookies, of course. Panic set in and I raced the hot pan to the counter and started plunging in cookie cutters to try and salvage that disaster. My mother caught me in the act, flushed with burned fingers. Dessert is dessert though, right? Not for me. My biggest fear was failing my parents and their expectations of me; what purpose do we have if we do not make our parents proud? I felt as though the wind was knocked out of me. I was embarrassed, disheartened, and disappointed in myself. Naturally, it was not a big deal to my mother. She hugged me and told me how proud she was that I baked something (in fact, she liked the dessert), but there was a dreadful feeling of guilt; this was the first time I recognized that I failed and did not fulfill my mother’s expectations. I learned a lot that cold October day: 1) Two cups of milk do not make cookie dough, 2) Parents love their kids no matter what mistakes they make, and 3) I was going to pursue criminal justice. The culinary arts and law enforcement are closely linked: both have a “recipe” that has consequences if one strays from it; “ingredients” that are essential to doing the job right; and no room for error. From that day forward, I was determined to learn, analyze, and accept mistakes and develop solutions from them. There is no such thing as perfection in this world; there is only hard work, dedication, great success, and greater failure. I used to capitalize on the fact that I never failed, but that is not reality. Everyone fails, and accepting defeat is the only way to achieve maximum success. Today, I am the first person my relatives call to bake for a birthday party, or share one of my recipes, or teach their kids the art of baking. If a recipe falls through, I take to the cookbooks to find the problem and fix it. Failure is another opportunity, an experiment to find the best solution. Failure is a pride-worthy accomplishment that demonstrates passion. Failure is adding two cups of milk to oatmeal cookie dough and creating a masterpiece.

Mental health has always been taboo in my household. My parents are loving and caring individuals, but their Ukrainian background made topics like mental health and stress inexpressible subjects. As an American student with Eastern European parents, education was number one; grades below 95% meant that either I was slacking or did not respect the sacrifices my parents made to immigrate to the United States. I was constantly pushing myself to make them proud — which is a good thing — but it put me in an unnerved state. The 2020 lockdowns were my breaking point. The pressure and anxiousness of elearning and staying home piled on mountains of anger and frustration that I did not know how to cope with. I could not bring it up to my parents; I was embarrassed to tell my friends, and notifying teachers was out of the question. When the emotional volcano erupted, I began “self-medicating.” Today, I have scars all over my left side. The grooves are disjointed, unpatterned, and ugly. I came up with excuses like, “I banged my legs into a wooden door,” or “Bad fall off my bike” whenever someone pointed them off. Pushing my mental health off was fine for a while, but in the long run, it extinguished my relationships. I pulled away from my friends and had uncontrollable outbursts towards my family. Although it was difficult to, in a sense, rebuild myself, I slowly opened myself up to the world and reconnected with friends and family. My experience with mental health is not atypical. Kids, teenagers, and adults worldwide struggle with mental health every day, whether diagnosed or undiagnosed. Realizing that other people suffer from the same thing I did makes my need to help others more powerful. With my personal experience in mind, my desired goal in pursuing criminal justice is to become the person that can understand the hurt others experience and coach them through that pain to spark their fight to live through the bad and the good. After all, the most helpful teachers fought through the same experience as the student and chose life.

She positioned herself on the bare snow, elbows propped, covered in twigs and fallen branches and dead leaves. She was as still as a deer in headlights, focused, watching her prey line up with the scope of her sniper. Once she caught sight- BOOM! Lady Death never missed. Lyudmila Pavlichenko is named the best female sniper in history. She was born in the Soviet Union in 1916 and was the definition of a “tomboy,” often competing in athletic sports. Her unorthodox interest in shooting earned Pavlihenko the Voroshilov Sharpshooter Badge, one of the USSR’s most honorable awards. When the Nazis began invading the lower parts of the Soviet empire in 1941, Pavlichenko left her studies to become an educator to join the Red Army. It was not easy for Pavlichenko to rise to her title of ‘Lady Death.’ The sergeants and lieutenants she served under forced her to work as a combat nurse instead of a shooter; naturally, Pavlichenko took fate into her own hands. She grabbed a sniper, hid near enemy lines, and waited for 18 hours before shooting two German correspondents. 309 kills later, Pavlichenko gained unconditional respect from the enemy and the USSR. I admire Pavlichenko because she proved that women could be as powerful, fierce, and valiant as men. There was no reason for a woman to hold herself back from strenuous tasks and jobs, especially male-dominated ones. While Pavlichenko did not stand for feminism, she proved women’s capabilities. Her story inspired me to pursue a career in fighting crime and keeping communities safe. Pavlichenko was 5’ 1” and feared by men twice her size; at 5’ 6”, I am confident I can make a difference. I aspire to have her grit and strength to teach women that, no matter what, they can.